Silvia Ramundo, Group Leader at the GMI, has been awarded an FWF ASTRA Award in recognition of her research on chloroplast biology. The ASTRA Awards, launched by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), support outstanding early-career researchers with long-term funding to establish themselves as international leaders in their fields.
Ramundo’s project, Decoding the Chloroplast Unfolded Protein Response, investigates how chloroplasts—the plant cell’s energy-producing organelles—signal distress when exposed to damaging environmental conditions, such as excess sunlight. These signals trigger protective responses in the cell, but scientists still don’t know exactly what the signals are or how they work. By studying the mechanisms behind this process, Ramundo aims to shed light on how plants maintain cellular health under stress—a topic with implications for agriculture and environmental resilience.
The award provides research funding over five years and supports Ramundo’s continued work at the GMI. “I’m honored to receive the ASTRA Award,” says Ramundo. “It gives us the freedom to pursue ambitious ideas about chloroplast signaling and their broader role in sustaining life on Earth.”
The FWF ASTRA Awards are among the most competitive research grants in Austria, aimed at empowering the next generation of scientific leaders.
About Silvia Ramundo
Silvia Ramundo earned her PhD in molecular biology at the University of Geneva, where she studied chloroplast biogenesis in the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii under the supervision of Jean-David Rochaix. She later joined the lab of Peter Walter at the University of California, San Francisco, where she worked as an EMBO and Swiss National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow and later as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute research specialist. During this time, she pioneered new approaches to study chloroplast stress signaling and protein homeostasis in plant cells. In 2021, Ramundo joined the Gregor Mendel Institute (GMI) in Vienna as a group leader. Her work has been recognized with multiple awards and fellowships, including long-term support from EMBO and the Swiss National Science Foundation.